Alex Buscemi
Ever heard of “blinker fluid”? If you have, you’re either a seasoned pro at your job or you’ve fallen victim to one of the oldest employee pranks in the book.
In most industries, there’s a rite of passage for the newbies, and it often involves some good-natured ribbing. From wild goose chases for non-existent items (like “blinker fluid”) to handing rookie healthcare workers a bag full of air labeled “Fart Sample”, these initiation rituals are a hilarious way to welcome new team members.
Here are some of the funniest, most creative pranks that seasoned workers have pulled on the greenhorns. So enjoy these laugh-out-loud work stories that prove no matter where you work, there’s always room for a little humor at the new guy’s expense.
In Germany a spirit level is called Wasserwaage (water scale). So the kids are sent out to get the Ausgleichgewichte (balancing weights) for the Wasserwaage.
But I’m glad that my company doesn’t allow that s**t. You got a little kid in front of you. That kid is 16/17/18. They are nervous as f**k. No need to take them down even more just because it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling of being smarter. If that’s what you are aiming for… Seems like a sad life.Be a mentor, don’t be an a*****e.
When I was in the Marine Corps, I was in the air wing as a repair squadron as a tin bender. My Sargent told me to go to the supply building and get 100ft of flight line. I already knew about this since my buddy worked in supply. So I said “sir, yes sir” and just spent two hours hanging out with Buddy. When I get back I pretend to be confused and he has a good laugh. Win, win all around.
“WD-40 isn’t gonna be quite strong enough. run to the supply room and get a can of WD-41”.
I used to work in a diesel engine manufacturing plant.
We would send new people to the parts cage to get spark plugs.
Rock climbing guide. I constantly get people asking how I get the ropes up. My coworkers and I all have different answers varying from “there’s a ladder/elevator in the back of the rock” to “we retrained old mail carrier pigeons” or “grappling hook.”
I’ve had a shocking amount of people who will walk around to look for a ladder then glare at me later once they realized the joke on them.
In anesthesia, sometimes we ask the patient, “let me know when you’re asleep.”.
I’m a nurse and used to work in hospitals. We had little biohazard bags that we would use to send tubes of blood and other assorted bodily fluids to the lab for tests. I had a fellow nurse who would blow a bag full of air and label it “fart sample”, then give it to an unsuspecting unit secretary. One poor secretary failed to find any fart test orders in the computer and asked us how to enter it in ?.
Me setting up gas/air lines in the prenatal chemistry lab: *Hey new kid, go get me a roll of fallopian tubing*.
I worked at Best Buy in college and we would have tell the new guy that when they clocked out they needed to hit #19 on the desk phone and say they were leaving for the day, what they accomplished, and their favorite part of the day. We told them it was an automated time and labor tool that automatically clocked them out . Really it called the stores intercom system and blared it over the loud speakers for everyone in the store. Pretty embarrassing and gave all the rest of us a good chuckle. The best part it was delayed so they typically made it all the way across the store until it started to play back.
Working at a McDonalds in the mid to late 1990s we’d sent the new employees out into the lobby to water the numerous plants in the entire seating area – they were all fake plants.
Send the apprentice to get the wire stretcher.
Have the apprentice hold a bucket under a cut cable to catch the extra amps that leak out.
This isn’t going to all fit, go get the shelf stretcher.
I work on an airfield. We have the new guys stand outside holding a piece of printer paper above their heads at night so the air traffic controllers can “calibrate the light gun”. It’s literally just a fancy flash light.
We had one guy stand out there for almost 20 minutes before he realized we were messing with him.
When I worked at Pizza Hut in the 90s we would send the new driver to another Pizza Hut to get our cheese grater. We would call ahead and that store would send them to KFC, KFC would send them to Burger King. I don’t recall it going farther than that.
Two cans of steam. My buddy confused the heck out of a trainee in the kitchen by, during a rush, frantically telling him to go and get two cans of steam from the back.
Go grab the box of f-stops from the camera bag.
I don’t know if there is something like that in my profession (MEP/building engineer) but one of my professors told a story when he first got out of school and got a job, and the first thing they asked him to do was figure out the transformer to feed a panel. So, he spent the next few hours calculating turn ratio, iron core thickness, and other parameters of a transformer. Wrote it all down and took it to the senior engineer to review his work. The senior engineer took one look at what he did, pulled a catalog off his shelf (this was before the internet), opened it up and pointed to a transformer available to buy. “That’s all you need to do”, he said.
Jump up and down on top of an Army tank to check the shocks. Also walk around it and hit it with a mallet to check for soft spots.
Asking to check the to see if the new guy’s hammer has a whee. Then tossing it as far as possible. .
Fun fact…
I know a guy who started a company selling “blinker fluid” just to make a buck off people who still think this is funny.He gets angry email messages from senior mechanics all the time, who made the mistake of telling the new guy to get blinker fluid, only for the new guy to realise they didn’t have any, and to ask purchasing to order a palletload.
Apparently, this extremely specific scenario happens enough for him to drive a current year car.
Surgeon here. We peel tissue off bones and cartilage with various named types of “elevators” to elevate tissue. So we’d ask new scrub tech’s to pass an Otis elevator.
(That’s the company that makes regular elevators in buildings).
Ah, yes, such things are rite of passsage in the military. I have sent people (and been sent, myself) to supply for a viariety of things, such as:
An ID ten T (ID10T)B A eleven hundred NST rings (balloon strings)
A length of flight line
A roll of fallopian tube
A bucket of prop wash
A tube of squelch grease
Muffler bearings
Chemlight Batteries
Rear-view Mirror fluid
A box of ground guides
A bag of grid squares
I’ve also given the new guy a hammer a piece of chalk and told him to find all the soft spots in the armor of an MRAP, and given people a box of trash bags and sent them into the motor pool to take exhaust samples.
The one that really got me into trouble, though, was when I sent someone around the operations center to collect the EMHO Report (that stands for Early Morning Hard On); the Major in charge of operations didn’t think it was funny *at all* and almost brought me up on several counts of sexual harassment charges (I was 23 and stupid). My platoon sergeant was able to talk her down from that, but I was in the professional doghouse for *months* afterward.
‘Quick, go get the left handed chopping board’ or ‘Quick, I need the left handed knife’
Or my favourite….’Why don’t you go chop up some flour’.
I like to write on a piece of paper “help I’m stuck in the copy machine” and scan-to email from a central unit to a coworkers’s inbox. Alternatively, I just write it on a piece of copy paper and put it back in the hopper so it shows up on someone’s print job.
Press the “any” key.
We sent out an apprentice for some left-handed frying pans and a bacon stretcher. The other pubs in the area played into it and sent him on a wild goose chase. Guy still got paid for his time though so it was just a fun prank.
Glass hammer… when I got my first apprentice job in manufacturing the person I was shadowing sent me to the managers office to ask for one, he was in the middle of a meeting so I knocked on, he waved me in and I asked for it in front of about 7 fully experienced upper management people… they all looked at me for a second and then burst out laughing ?.
At Domino’s when we’re stretching the pizza dough and accidentally rip a hole in it it’s common to ask the newbie to get the Dough Patch Repair Kit. Once I had a new guy running around the store for a good 15 minutes trying to find it, asking everyone he could if they’ve seen it.
Pneumatic fluid. Or in scouts sending someone around to find a left handed spatula.
Read More: 45 Funny Work Memes To Power You Through The Week (June 3, 2024)